Injury, disasters, violence, maltreatment, and chronic exposure to conflict or family / community violence affect tens of millions of children each year globally. After such events, traumatic stress and other psychological sequelae can have substantial impact on children’s health and wellbeing.

A growing number of studies track child symptoms and recovery after an acute trauma. And there is a growing body of research evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to prevent or treat the consequences of a wide range of types of trauma. But small samples often limit generalizability, and wide variation in measures makes cross-study comparisons challenging.

The Child Trauma Data Archives project is an international collaborative effort to address this challenge.

• bringing datasets together in a common format
• helping to preserve these data for future use
• using expert input to make data ready for integrative cross-study analyses.

Investigators contribute their data to the Archives to help build and sustain this important resource for the field. (Submitting data may also help investigators meet data sharing requirements from their funders.) The Archives are growing - the PACT/R archive currently has datasets from studies conducted in 5 countries, representing data from more than 5500 children and adolescents.

Researchers can request data from the Archives for secondary analysis - to examine risk and protective factors for post-trauma psychological sequelae, and to understand trajectories of traumatic stress and related symptoms over time.

Mission and purpose of the Child Trauma Data Archives:

Create a research resource for the child trauma field that will enhance the utility and value of child trauma studies by

• allowing integrative cross-study analyses of individual-level data
• promoting the use of common data elements across future studies